Just to report back I bought a HP netbook for the task. It came with 500gig HD, 1gig of memory (but could do with some more), dual core atom intel processor and three USB ports. I will have to investigate a decent USB hub for it so that I can put robofocus on the scopes.
So far it has worked but there as usual are some quirky things about win 7 as in every edition they have brought out. Most things worked straight off the bat but my Orion SSAG required 64 bit drivers on a 32 bit system to work
, which I find really odd, since that driver should not work.
As a matter of opinion I don't see that Win 7 is any better than Vista really. Vista for me was stable, albeit it did not like CCDsoft 5 for some reason.
Anyway, for now this is working nicely and collecting data. It does not process any data, just collects what I want.